 the CIA report caused a lot of discussion and fuss. What is it all about? Well, the CIA isn't entirely new to criticism throughout its history. It's been subject to various investigations that have been very critical about its actions and about its relationship with the policy-making community. But this one is particularly sharp in its criticism. It criticizes internal management, it criticizes the oversight arrangements, and it criticizes the effectiveness of the agency's methods. So what about the effectiveness? What is the criticism? Well, the criticism is that they don't work, that the enhanced interrogation methods that were applied by the agency after 9-11 up until about 2006 were simply ineffective. This, of course, has been disputed by many of the people from the Bush administration, Dick Cheney in particular, but the report is quite unambiguous in his statement that they added no value to the American intelligence mission. What has it been for the future of intelligence services, like the CIA, but also maybe Britain? It will put greater pressure on them to be accountable to policymakers and to be very, very robust in their internal management arrangements. One of the most striking things about the report appears to be the lack of oversight over junior staff who are in charge of these programs. So what does it mean for the oversight process as a whole? Well, this raises an interesting question for the oversight process, because the report appears to have split the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It was released by the Democrats and has been condemned by the Republicans and indeed by former members of the intelligence community who claim not to have been consulted enough and who are saying that the report's conclusions are flat out wrong in many cases. It's going to lead to an interesting debate certainly about the future of the oversight process and whether or not agencies like the CIA who have been given a lot of extra resources, a lot of extra manpower and a lot of operational freedom over the past number of years, over whether or not that they can be trusted with this kind of power. Is there any justification for criticising the report? There could be certain viable criticisms of the report. For example, over its research methodology it's been claimed by former CIA director Michael Hayden, for example, that they've been very selective in the way they've quoted documents or used documents and that they've not interviewed people who were involved in the program. These may or may not be particularly robust criticisms, obviously summarising six million pages of information will require some editing and the CIA has in the past been less than forthcoming about letting its staff be interviewed. For you as an intelligence scholar, do you think that there is now going to be a wealth of new information that will help you in your work and others? This report does give us quite a lot of new information about the CIA's practices since 2011, certainly a lot of it makes for very depressing reading. Less depressing reading is of course your wonderful book which we should plug quickly. This book is about intelligence gathering in the early Cold War and is focused on the all source intelligence effort, so using signals intelligence, using open source intelligence, using traditional spies to gain a better understanding of the Soviet Union's strategic, economic and political strength. Okay, great. Thanks a lot and happy Christmas. Thank you, Herr Busch.